What If It’s All Slipping Away?
Last Wednesday was my sister Melissa’s birthday – the third one since her death. She would have turned 43. As her birthday approached, I had a hard time figuring out how I felt about it and how I wanted to spend the day.
The first year after she died, it felt important to me to make her birthday meaningful in a big way. I organized a Day of Kindness, encouraging people to perform small acts of kindness in her honor. I created a website, shared it all over socials, and made a point to invite anyone and everyone I knew to participate.
And people did participate – in the hundreds. It was beautiful, hearing both from those who knew her and those who didn’t. It warmed my heart knowing that July 17, 2022 was a day that the world was perhaps just a little bit softer, a little bit kinder, and a little bit more beautiful, all in honor of my dear Seester.
Last year, there were continued Days of Kindness, but I didn’t feel as up for the organization and fanfare of it all. For the most part, it was observed by family and close friends.
And this year? This year there I felt like I wanted to do something entirely different. Somehow the organizing of it all made me feel tired and overwhelmed. I just didn’t feel the desire to do the same things I’d done in years past. I wanted to keep things simpler and quieter.
And while there’s absolutely nothing wrong (and truly something beautiful) about honoring our people in quieter ways, I couldn’t help but wonder if it meant something that I didn’t want all the celebration and community that felt so important to me on that first birthday.
Did wanting something different mean that I was honoring my needs and my ability to experiment with what feels best in my grief? Or did it mean that my beloved Seester was somehow a bit further away—that my relationship with her was shifting into something more distant, like two friends drifting apart over time?
To me, these are scary questions. These are the parts of grief that I feel less prepared for. Sometimes I can’t help feeling that every choice I make–or that I don’t make–reveals something about my love for those I’ve lost.
What does it mean when our expressions of love for those we’ve lost change over time?
It’s often terrifying knowing that our relationships with those who’ve died can never be exactly what they once were. I am deeply intimate with this fear. I notice things shifting and changing, and it activates such a fear in me that it will all slip away. As everything keeps changing, will my love change too?
And yet, I also know that grief requires us to listen and to experiment. So I listened, and I experimented. And even though it felt a bit scary, I did things differently this year.
Instead of my sister’s birthday being about sharing the day with everyone, this year’s birthday celebration was more intimate. It was a Seester party for two. I went for a solo hike wearing my sister’s hiking shoes. I watched one of her favorite movies—one I haven’t felt ready to watch since she died—and laughed and cried my way through. I wrote her a birthday card (a tradition I started last year), and I ate some of her favorite foods, and my family did a few small acts of kindness in her honor.
And as I was walking in the woods–the place where everything makes just a little more sense to me–I realized something.
We get to know and choose what our love looks like. We get to know and choose what this year’s birthday looks like, or how we want to spend a death anniversary, or how we want to invite those we’ve lost into our everyday lives. We get to decide what love looks like this year, and what it looks like next, and to know that those might look different, and that it’s all okay and it’s all enough.
Love is love. It just. . . is. It is not measurable or quantifiable. It is not subject to the whims of my worries. It has no use for the difference between a party of hundreds and a party of two.
Love picks up right where we left off. It lives in places big and small. Love lives in a Day of Kindness that I celebrated with hundreds, and it also lives in the quiet walk that I took in the woods wearing my sister’s shoes.
This year I learned that I can trust myself to know what love looks like and to know where love lives. Sometimes I feel desperate to steer this ship into the one safe harbor where I know my love will be protected forever, but maybe instead it’s about riding the waves to places unknown, trusting myself to find the small and sometimes unexpected harbors along the way.
I hope, my dear reader, that you land in your own safe harbors. Even when everything is shifting and uncertain, may you trust yourself to find your way to the place where love lives.
As always, take gentle care of yourself.
